2008 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Winner
2008 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Winner
Jeffrey Toobin
for The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Doubleday)
Judges' Citation
"In The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Toobin tells the story of the Conservative rebellion that has transformed the character of the court, one justice at a time. As Justice Stephen Breyer said from the bench last June, dissenting from a decision that erodes school desegregation, 'It is not often in law that so few have so quickly changed so much.' In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas, Toobin has written a work of great narrative journalism in which the particular and the personal illuminate an historic moment. The Nine is a masterful group portrait of the justices who will decide what justice means in America."
Bio
Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN, is one of the most recognized and admired legal journalists in the country.
Toobin joined CNN in 2002 after six years with ABC News. In 2000, he received an Emmy Award for his coverage of the Elian Gonzalez case. His other best-selling books include Too Close to Call: The 36-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election, which was published in 2001, A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President (2000) and The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson (1996).
Since joining The New Yorker, Toobin has covered legal affairs and written profiles of Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, as well as such subjects as the legal implications of the war on terror, Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Florida recount, Kenneth Starr's investigation of President Clinton, and the trials of Martha Stewart, Timothy McVeigh and O. J. Simpson.
Before joining The New Yorker, Toobin served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Brooklyn, New York. He also served as an associate counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, an experience that provided the basis for his first book, Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case—United States v. Oliver North.
Jeffrey Toobin received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1982, and, in 1986, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He lives in Manhattan.
Judges for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
Connie Bruck, staff writer at The New Yorker; Patricia Nelson Limerick, faculty director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Jonathan Weiner, author of The Beak of the Finch.